Valley of the Kings Journal; If It's Not for Eternal Rest, What About Those Pillows?

By IAN FISHER

Published: May 31, 2006

It had been 84 years since a tomb was unearthed here in the scorching desert burial ground for pharaohs, and the hope, of course, was for mummies. What else could be inside the seven coffins, at the bottom of a shaft that until February had been sealed off from all but termites for over three millenniums?

Very nice pillows, for starters.

''No idea, I'm sorry,'' Elsie van Rooij, an expert on ancient textiles, said, when asked why it was that some burial worker had stuffed five pillows into the child-size coffin she was examining. Coffins usually hold bodies. She had never seen anything like it. Naturally, that pleased her.

''A tomb should be mysterious,'' she said.

After three months of painstaking work since the February discovery, with five of the coffins opened, no mummies have been found. So there is a chance that this is not a tomb at all, but rather a cache for used embalming materials.

But there is one big coffin left to open -- the most tantalizing one, sealed, wedged into the back of the space and supported by pillows at its head and feet, with the kind of care that could suggest that someone important is inside.

The American Egyptologists who are working here plan to open it, hoping not only to see a mummy but to solve the many mysteries of the new find. They may also shatter a long-held belief that there is nothing important left to find in the Valley of the Kings.

''If it will be a mummy, it will be a big discovery,'' said Mansour Boraik, the Egyptian government's head of antiquities at Luxor.

[The theory that there might be a mummy in the last coffin got a boost on May 24: a small gilded sarcophagus, of a quality that could suggest royalty, was found under the pillows in the small coffin she was examining.]

If there is a mummy, Dr. Boraik's favorite choice of who it might be is Ankhesenpaaten, King Tutankhamen's widow. One of the few pieces of writing found at the bottom of the shaft, on a broken seal, is a part of her name.

''What happened to this widow, we don't know,'' he said.

Hopes aside, there has never been any suggestion that the new discovery, called KV-63, has anywhere near the significance of KV-62, the last tomb uncovered, in 1922. That one, famously, held the mummy of Tutankhamen and one of the greatest troves of Egyptian artifacts ever found. The valley had given up nothing major since.

The new find is only a few feet away from King Tut's tomb. But it is just one small and unadorned room, at the bottom of a shaft that the American team, led by Otto Schaden, an Egyptologist who leads a project with the University of Memphis, discovered last year.

He had been digging around some ancient workmen's huts near the tomb of the pharaoh Ay, the last king of the 18th dynasty and the life's work of Dr. Schaden. On the last day of the dig, in the last possible place, he came across what he now calls ''an unusual situation.''

''Lo and behold, there was a dark layer where there should have been bedrock,'' said Dr. Schaden, 68, who smokes a pipe, has a goatee, carries lots of pens in his dusty vest and so looks very satisfyingly like an Egyptologist. ''So we knew something was up.''

The team reached the bottom of the shaft, some 18 feet down, in February. First hopes were extraordinarily high, buoyed by 28 clay jars, meticulously sealed, ringed around seven coffins, in bad shape from termite damage but each with gorgeous face masks.

Dr. Schaden was cautious, but some experts speculated that this might even be the tomb of Nefertiti, the beautiful and ambitious wife of Akhenaten, the most enigmatic pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1352 B.C. to 1336 B.C.

The style of the shaft, the type of pottery and a wine label, identical to one found in King Tut's tomb, all confirmed for the team that this place dates from the 18th dynasty. But opening the jars and coffins produced not mummies or body parts but puzzles.

The child's coffin contained pillows of exceptionally fine cotton, and Dr. Boraik said he did not know of pillows ever being stuffed inside coffins. Four of the other coffins contained not human remains, as is common, but a few top-quality alabaster jars, embalming salts, linen, what looked like a stone cornice and loads of broken pottery and dirt.

The signs pointed to the room being a cache for embalming materials but there seemed also a strange rush: Egyptian coffins are often covered with resin to preserve them, but in this case it seemed to have been slathered on sloppily. Several of the sealed jars, which also contained broken pottery, were smashed and the bits stuffed inside the coffins.

''Why they took jars that were already filled, broke them and put them in coffins -- that's strange,'' he said. The floor, too, was scattered with broken pottery.

Again, Dr. Schaden resists much speculation -- and the answer, at any rate, may come soon when the team finally breaks the seal of the last coffin and looks inside. But he has not ruled out some ancient foul play.

''If there is anyone tucked inside that last coffin, it's probably someone they wanted to hide,'' he said.

Dr. Schaden does not believe the absence of mummies so far can be explained by tomb robbers. ''If a tomb is plundered, there is usually an arm here, a finger there, the skull,'' he said, ''because they dismember the bodies looking for trinkets.''

Unlike the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, the excavation of KV-63 has been followed by filmmakers. A documentary about the work, ''Egypt's New Tomb Revealed,'' will be shown June 4 on the Discovery Channel at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

Dr. Boraik puts the probability of a mummy inside the coffin at 70 percent. The fine pillows and alabaster jars, the broken seal with the fragment of a name and the arrangement of the jars in what he said seemed a protective position all suggested that this was not a mere embalming cache.

''I hope this coffin will solve the mystery,'' he said.

Photos: Dr. Schaden held a small gilded sarcophagus that was discovered last Wednesday in the chamber. (Photo by Discovery Channel); The last tomb found in the Valley of the Kings was that of King Tutankhamen in 1922. The coffins that were found in February in a chamber beneath the valley were examined May 23 by Otto Schaden and Elsie van Rooij, at left. That chamber has not yet been found to contain mummies in its coffins. (Photo by Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times)